Jonathan Barnbrook is one of our design heroes. He created some of the most successful postmodern typefaces for Emigre, including Mason – now part of the digital collection of MOMA. He designed the definitive art book for Damien Hirst, I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. In 1999 he participated in the First Things First Manifesto signed by graphic designers, students and photographers who proposed a reversal of priorities in the way graphic design was used commercially. He designed the covers for David Bowie…read more

After meeting the owner Damon Styer at an AIGA meeting in San Francisco, we had a chance to visit his signpainting shop New Bohemia Signs – one of the longest running sign shop in San Francisco, dealing exclusively in hand painted signs. Located in 281 9th Street in the South of Market neighborood, New Bohemia is a beautiful sight for any letterform lover, with its wall covered in commercial signs side by side with pieces that were created by Damon for its own art shows. Damon Styer, owner of New Bohemia. “Practice is…read more

While working at the branding for Lucca Comics & Games Festival 2013, we were proposed an ambitious claim: “A Style Issue“. The organizers of Lucca Festival, a huge event with hundreds of thousands of attendees, wanted to renew their image combining a the pop imagery of comics, roleplaying games and videogames with the italian High Fashion tradition. A bold challenge, which included the art direction of the team of illustrators at Riot Games, more accustomed to League of Legends werewolves than to Paris’ catwalks. We choose a typographic branding, developing a…read more

Script logos and calligraphy-inspired fonts are a big trend today. But script typography is not easy to use. Legibility issues, long ascenders and descenders, problems with all-uppercase words. We saw some interesting typefaces trying to address at least the readability issue – like the ubiquous Lobster font – but we were still not satisfied. We wanted to create a script typeface that was a bit like a swiss knife for designers, with easy to use features and a good result in display use but also in typesetting for short texts. This…read more

Creative trends move fast. Digital communities, Behance first, understand this quite well. They work as a worldwide trend report, creating a network of shared influences and global trends not dissimilar to the ones that fashion designers are used to cope with. Not to be intended as simple copy and paste solutions, these dominant trends are useful to the designers to better understand cultural forces that shape visual taste, and to keep our design sense always fresh. Many of the dominant visual trends are linked to the mobile revolution. Each design project has today the…read more